Congratulations, ADL Center for Technology and Society!

Fast Company’s second-annual World Changing Ideas Awards drew nearly 1,400 submissions in 12 categories. ADL is one of 240 entries that made it to the final round of judging. ADL’s Center for Technology and Society was named among other innovative teams in the category of “General Excellence,” including Facebook, Visa and AeroFarms.

The Online Hate Index (OHI), a joint initiative of ADL’s Center for Technology and Society and UC Berkeley’s D-Lab, is designed to transform human understanding of hate speech via machine learning into a scalable tool that can be deployed on internet content to discover the scope and spread of online hate speech. Through a constantly-evolving process of machine learning, based on a protocol developed by a team of human coders as to what does and does not constitute hate speech, this tool will uncover and identify trends and patterns in hate speech across different online platforms, allowing us to push for the changes necessary to ensure that online communities are safe and inclusive spaces. We have completed the first phase of the process in making this a reality, and are eager to advance the project. Critically, the tool is able to identify individual instances of hateful and abusive speech, helping solve a problem that has been inadequately addressed through reliance on platform users to report instances of abuse and violations of terms of service agreements.

This lesson plan helps 8-12 grade students explore and understand the current landscape of elected officials and Presidential hopefuls and how the 2018 midterm election broke records and barriers regarding diversity.